My opinion on the Olympics

Amongst my family & friends, I am an avid watcher of the Olympics. Summer, winter, you name it, I am watching it. Now, I don’t follow every popular athlete or sport, & I don’t watch the entire competition from start to finish. There are a few select sports I watch & athletes I follow a tiny bit outside of the Olympic Games. However, I will not, under any circumstances, miss watching the opening & closing ceremonies in their entirety, as well as dissect each & every performance. I LOVE the opening ceremony the most out of the entire Olympics.

Ok, so I was prompted to talk about my favorite sports during these Games. In terms of Summer Olympics, I love watching all the main water sports, even though I myself do not enjoy physically being in water. For example, I don’t like to swim (or lay on the beach), I have never rowed a boat of any capacity, & heights freak me out, so diving is out.

However, I still enjoy watching other people in the water doing sporty things. My favorite water events are: individual swimming, group relay swimming, solo & synchronized diving, & rowing. The other non-water events I enjoy are: men’s/women’s gymnastics & all the track & field events. Pretty much everyone watches the Summer Olympics just to tune in to the gymnastics parts ’cause sports media is always hyper focused on whose going to be the next Simone Biles.

When it comes to the Winter Olympics, I enjoy watching most of the skiing events & now some of the big-time snowboarding events as well. Some of my favorite events are: ski jumping, moguls, all the downhill or whatever you call the events Mikaela Shiffrin/Lindsey Vonn competes in, & the events with the fancy tricks. This applies to snowboarding as well. I enjoy watching those athletes do the most impossible tricks on what is pretty much a wheel-less skateboard.

I’m not a skier or snowboarder myself, although I have tried skiing when I was a young child. My dad helped me learn some basics, but ultimately decided that skiing was too dangerous for his fragile daughter. So, I ended up not taking an interest in skiing like my siblings did. Instead, I turned my interest toward ice skating. I was pretty good at it too, & took a couple meaningful years of lessons, but did not advance enough to learn how to axle-jump or spin.

Which brings me to my next favorite event. My mom & I are huge fans of the figure skating events during the Olympics. We love watching individual men’s & women’s competitions, ice dancing, pairs skating, & now the team event. That’s pretty much our favorite part of the Winter Olympics. We get really into it too, dissecting all of the judges’ scores & all that.

On top of that, I love watching some of the sports that my family finds to be weird. I love watching all of the bobsled, luge, & skeleton events even though Jian thinks they’re boring, & my mom finds them too scary. Every time I watch the Winter Olympics, I’m always crossing my fingers, hoping the Jamaican bobsledding team will win a medal. Hey, I can keep my movie dreams alive, right?

I also enjoy watching curling. Nobody in my household, except myself, enjoys ice bocce with Swiffer brooms. However, I’ve just developed some strange fascination with this event. I know it can be pretty boring to watch, but it’s fun to have this as background TV noise while you’re cooking or working.

When it comes to cheering for athletes or teams, I tend to cheer for the underdogs or standout favorites. I don’t always cheer for my home country’s team. I like supporting athletes or teams that win in an event for the very first time. Those moments are some of the most fun to watch, or even the ones where a veteran athlete wins that one elusive career medal before they announce their retirement.

When I watch an Olympic Games, I try to really watch from a fan perspective & not make too many political judgements. I know it’s hard to separate what you see or read in the news about certain countries who host Olympic Games from the actual Games & its meaning of clean sportsmanship. I had a hard time watching the Summer Olympics in Brazil after watching so many news clips about all the displaced impoverished citizens of Rio de Janeiro. It was hard for me to see all these beautiful scenes in the Olympic village, while knowing that just over the brick wall is a slum city & government officials are constantly downplaying the severity of that public image.

I really try to enjoy watching the Olympics without too much judgement going into the Games. It’s fun watching this sporting event happen every four years (or every 2 years if you’re watching both summer & winter). Lately, there’s been quite a bit of news about the decline of the Olympic Games, & many major cities dropping out of hosting the Games. I will admit that those news stories kind of dimmed my interest in the Olympics a little bit, but I still get excited every time I see a commercial for the upcoming Games on TV, & cannot wait to watch the next opening & closing ceremonies.